Meet ups with friends & family
We are occasionally reminded that our life on the road includes more than just traveling about, and no part of life is left out. It was with great sadness that we learned of my cousin Richard’s sudden and unexpected passing.
We had to get across upstate New York State and we only had two days. We hoped to find somewhere interesting to stop for the night. Ithaca!
The more we travel, the more places there are that we have been to, and the more likely we are to cross a path we’ve followed before. Such was the case as we figured how we were going to get from St. Louis to Vermont. Suppose we went up to Michigan, then back into Canada and around the north side of Lake Erie? Well, looky here, that path might go right by Kalamazoo!
We have a regular RV parking spot in St Louis.
When my uncle Joe retired from a career in the military, after having lived in many interesting places around the world, he moved back to our small home town in NH. So, unlike Joe’s older sons Mike, Gary and Steve, Dave and I graduated from the same high school. Dave was only 11 when I left our home town, so I never really got to know him back then. During his own stint in the military, Dave met Mardena. They married, moved to Oklahoma and raised 3 kids. Like his brothers, Dave and I had only seen each other once or possibly twice as adults.
We contacted Dave and Mardena on our trip in 2016 hoping to visit – we could easily head to Oklahoma from southeast Colorado. *SIGH* They had just retired and moved to Costa Rica.
Howard was the first snowboarder we ever got to know. The year was 2000 and a dedicated group of us were all skiing with the Black Diamond Club, a Sugarbush program for expert adult skiers – and one snowboarder. According to Howard, he switched to snowboarding so he could ride with his young sons. Still, he didn’t want to give up hanging with his friends in the BDC. Howard, with his characteristic big grin, had the best of both worlds! For so long a part of our tight-knit Sugarbush community, we love Howard!
Back at the turn of the current century, 3 couples were trying to figure out how to move to Vermont and earn an income while living an outdoor oriented lifestyle – Dave and Sandra from eastern Massachusetts, Stan and Cyndee from the Berkshires in Massachusetts and Doug and me from Connecticut. We all met while skiing at Sugarbush and became fast friends – aka the 6-pack. We all achieved the goal and moved to the Mad River Valley between 2004 and 2006.
Fast forward 10 years and thoughts turned to retirement and coloring in the next chapter of our books. First Stan and Cyndee, then Dave and Sandra got hooked by the big mountain skiing at Big Sky, Montana and were gradually reeled in, ultimately moving to that delightful ski town. And Doug and I developed our current process for alternating Vermont skiing in the winter with these nomadic adventures in the summer. Sad to split the 6-pack? Yes. Fortunately, our respective retirement plans allow themselves to intersect from time to time. We’ve been out a couple of times in winter to ski, and twice now we’ve been able to stage our summer road trips to include a swing by this cool town, surrounded by mountains and National Parks – where our friends live.
Barring something unforeseen, Penticton, BC is the farthest west we will venture on this trip. We’d actually intended to begin moving eastward again from Revelstoke, but as we were filling in the details we found out that Lisa Brokop and Paul Jefferson would be doing a show a few hours from there at right about the same time we were in the area. Lisa is a Canadian singer/songwriter now based in Nashville. Her husband, American singer/songwriter Paul Jefferson, is my cousin.
Linden, Alberta is a town about an hour’s drive northeast of Calgary with a few more than 800 residents. Two of those residents are pictured with us in the photo above.
Our approach to trip preparation includes doing a bit of reading and talking to people about where we’re heading. Based on what we learn, we go to our trusty electronic map and add e-pushpins indicating friends and family, potential places of interest, and music festivals. When we left home, Saskatchewan was looking a bit thin with not quite 4 pushpins across the entire province – Prince Albert National Park, Doug’s guitar buddy TerryB, the Saskatchewan Jazz Festival in Saskatoon, and the name of an old drumming colleague (but no current contact info).
As we approached Saskatchewan, the sparsity of pushpins turned around in a fashion reminiscent of the classic (original series) Star Trek episode ‘The Trouble with Tribbles…’